Your Hero State – NLP Week 8

If you could instantly become a hero, for a second a minute or a day, would you?

I’m not talking about a superhero, like spiderman or superman. I mean simply being the best you’ve ever been.

Instead of feeling defeated you beat the feat. Rather than be shy you brim with confidence. No longer a loser just a winner. Don’t look at the mountain and say I couldn’t, look down from the peak and say what a view!

In week 8 (I think) of my NLP Pracictioner Course, we looked at states, anchoring and the circle of excellence.

We all get in a state; I don’t think we can humanly help it. Something happens in the cortex that kicks off the automatic response: fight or flight. Happens every day, just to a lesser extent. Your wife says “I just tidied that and now you’ve made it a mess again. Tut”. You can say oop sorry I’ll tidy it up now, or you can say I’ll do it later or say its only a few crumbs, don’t worry. Here’s where the state generating process begins. Your wife will do one; she’s in a state, you can’t control that. You react; your in a state, which you can control.

Is your state good, amenable, helpful, resolving, or is your state negative, aggressive, argumentative.

It’s so automatic that sometimes we can’t help starting out on the short bus ride to badstateville. But we can ring the bell and ask to get off before we get to the destination.

How?

We make a choice. We ask our amazing mind if it wouldnt so mind as to stop what it thinks is right and chill for a bit. Or not. But we certainly have a choice.

And one way of getting out of a state is to anchor good states, like a ship anchors in safe water, you anchor good states to get you back to where you want to be when the current is taking you elsewhere.

Anchors happen all the time. You remember the smell of popcorn and you’re reminded of a holiday as a child. A sound reminds you of a great day. A touch reminds you of your first embrace.

We can create our own anchors, too, so that when we are on the bad state journey, we can throw down the anchor, stop, get off and go to a good place.

The circle of excellence was a rousing, fun way to get to that point, the memory, that you’d like to replicate. There might be more than one anchors and states, for different situations, but you need to be absolutely clear in your mind (using all your senses) how it felt to be you at that time. And once you’re there: boom. Set your anchor. Do something that you and your body will know means change course, something that wouldn’t happen by accident. Ian suggested touching your ear lobe, I suggested a clap, my colleague preferred something more subtle. It matters little, what is important is that when launched, your anchor will take you out of the state you’re in (or heading to) and give you a much more useful state in its place.

It takes a while to master this, for sure. Why, just one day after the class, your esteemed genial and modest host failed miserably to avoid megabadstate, despite trying to launch the anchor ( LAUNCH DAMMIT LAUNCH!!).

But I’m sure I’ll get there, and you will too. Why? Because you want it. You want to be great, happy, content, confident, nice, wonderful, loved.